If You See Me, Don't Say Hi

by Neel Patel

  “Would you like to try it?” he said.

  I had never driven a boat before, but I said yes anyway. Then Ashwin grabbed me suddenly and guided me with his hands. I threw the engine in reverse. Ashwin fell forward.

  “Oh, god,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  He didn’t say anything for a while, just lay there on the floor like a dead animal. In his silver jacket he looked like one of the silver-skinned fish I had seen washed up on the shore. I was certain he would reprimand me, tell me I was an idiot, that I didn’t know what I was doing, that I was too inept for his home. Instead he laughed. He stood up and tossed his head back and laughed and laughed, the sun shining, the lake gleaming, the birds dancing over us like moths over a flame. I went over to kiss him, placing my hands on either side of his face, but he pulled away.

  * * *

  That afternoon, Ashwin made coffee while I set about preparing dinner. I had marked the necessary pages in Stephanie’s cookbook—highlighting the portions in which she had indicated to use two chilies instead of one, three tomatoes instead of four, red onions instead of yellow. It said to roast whole fresh spices from scratch instead of using spices from a bag. I had not read this before. Still, I continued, cleaning the chicken and marinating it with yogurt and salt. I chopped onions and fried them with cumin and cloves. I added ginger and garlic, too. The fragrance was intoxicating. I pictured Ashwin and me on a boat in the middle of the Indian Ocean, Ashwin reaching toward me instead of pulling away.

  “What’s this?” he said, looking over my shoulder. “You’re making chicken masala.”

  I had tried chicken marsala before, at the Olive Garden. I told Ashwin this and he laughed.

  “Not marsala,” he said. “Masala. It means spice.”

  I was embarrassed again, and also terrified; Ashwin told me his mother used to make him chicken masala every Sunday night.

  “Does Uma make it?” I asked.

  I knew it was a mistake as soon as I had said it. But I couldn’t help myself. I’d been hoping to find out about her all along. I’d assumed that I would, that, being in her house, among all of her things, I would be impressed by her somehow. But in this glass palace there wasn’t a single trace of her, not even her clothes.

  “Uma doesn’t cook,” he said, noticing a stain on the countertop, wiping it cleanly away.

  * * *

  The meal was awful: the chicken was rubbery and the curry tasted like Campbell’s Tomato Soup. But Ashwin didn’t seem to care. He ate noisily, smacking his lips. After dinner, he suggested we go to a bar—a gay bar called Renaissance. We got dressed in Ashwin’s room. I wore a floral-print shirt, acid-washed jeans. Ashwin wore a dress shirt and tie. I laughed at him.

  “You can’t wear that,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s not sexy enough.”

  I stripped off his clothes. Ashwin flipped me onto the bed and pressed his belly against my back. He said we could bring the nightclub home with us; there was no need to go to a bar. He had a strobe light and a fantastic sound system. He asked me to meet him downstairs. When I arrived, all the lights were off except for two red and white orbs flashing around the room. Ashwin reached for my hand.

  He danced well—surprisingly well. I should have known better. I should have remembered the Bollywood movies Kareena and I would watch at her house, how everyone was dancing, how they sometimes held hands. Kareena told me that in India it was common for men to hold hands—it didn’t make them queer, it just meant that they were friends. I pictured Ashwin and me in India. I pictured Ashwin holding my hand. I wondered if people would think that I was just a friend, too.

  Then Ashwin spun me around the room and told me that he had never felt this way before.

  “About a man?” I asked.

  “About anyone.”

  I found it utterly romantic. I had always dreamt of something like this. In high school I’d had visions of a life just like this one, with a man just like Aswhin. I’d pictured a house where everything was beautiful and where the pains of adolescence—the bullies, the scars, the look on Dylan Shaw’s face when he saw me on his doorstep that morning, and later, in the men’s room, after he followed me inside—simply faded away. I’d imagined there was someone out there who could make it all disappear, reinvent me somehow. And now there was.

  “Do you love me?” I asked, whispering in Ashwin’s ear.

  He told me he did.

  * * *

  That night, I dreamt of things I had never experienced before: palm trees and deserts and spices and sounds, Ashwin in a long silk tunic, standing in front of the Taj Mahal. I saw myself standing next to him, on a smooth white bench with Ashwin’s camera hanging from my neck. We slept together in a tight bundle on top of Ashwin’s sheets, tangled in each other’s arms, until the next morning when I woke up, and he was gone.

  It was late. Light streamed in just as it had the morning before, only this time it was cold and gray. This time, dark clouds hovered above. I closed my eyes. I opened them again. Then I went into the bathroom and splashed warm water on my face.

  Ashwin wasn’t in the kitchen. He wasn’t in the living room, either, and, after waiting a few moments, I began to worry, noticing his car keys on the kitchen countertop—next to Stephanie’s cookbook. Then a door burst open and Ashwin came rushing into the room. He was carrying a box with him, a large box filled with personal items, photographs and greeting cards which he set near the stove.

  “You have to leave,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Get your things.”

  I watched him disappear into a closet and come back with a broom. Outside, the boat was tied to the dock and covered in a thick black tarp, as if it had never been used.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Get out,” he said, firmly.

  Then he ran upstairs.

  “What’s going on, Ashwin?” I said, following him. “Why are you being this way?”

  He ignored me, dragging a suitcase into the room, ripping it open, rummaging inside. He began removing plastic bags full of clothing—women’s clothing—and hanging them in a closet nearby. Then he went into the dressers and took out condoms and lubricant and a pair of fuzzy handcuffs I had never seen before, that we had never used. He placed them in a bag.

  “Whose are those?” I said, sounding shrill.

  He was silent, checking the surrounding area, finding a place to conceal the bag. Then he turned to look at me.

  “Whose, Ashwin?”

  He said nothing.

  “Is it your wife?” I said, shouting. “Is it Uma?”

  He told me to get my things together and leave at once. I did as I was told, pulling a T-shirt over my head, throwing my underwear into my duffel bag, running downstairs to the front door—where I saw a huge car parked in the driveway, a white Lexus with chrome wheels.

  “Oh, fuck,” Ashwin said, coming up behind me. “Goddamn it.”

  A young couple got out of the car, an Indian couple with a small child. They were unloading their suitcases. They approached the front door. Ashwin pulled me aside. He was sweating.

  “Listen,” he said. “Just tell them you are my friend. Tell them you stopped by. Tell them you work with me”—he paused, panicked—“at the grocery store.”

  My heart dropped.

  “But you’re a dentist,” I said.

  He shook his head.

  * * *

  One evening, in high school, my father came home from a parent-teacher conference and asked me about a boy named Dylan Shaw. I didn’t think he remembered. I didn’t think he recalled that winter morning on Dylan’s front doorstep, shaking his hand—he had made a lot of house calls in those days—but then he told me about the meeting my teacher had called, to discuss what had happened, and now he knew everything: the names, mostly, but also the violence. The time my shirt was ripped open and cold water was poured over my head. The time I was thrown into a Dumpster behind our school. The
time Dylan and his friends chased me into a wooded area and took turns urinating on my face. I could see the terror in his eyes. He said they were bullies—they were afraid. They didn’t matter. But he was wrong: I was the one who was afraid.

  Everything mattered.

  I drove home that morning and replayed the scene at the lake house, hoping for it to change. I went to the market, the mall, picking things at random, not caring what they cost. I drove to the restaurant where Ashwin had taken me on our first date. I reached my apartment at dusk, carrying my duffel bag up the stairs. Stephanie was in the living room. She was smiling.

  “Where have you been all weekend?” she said.

  I didn’t tell her the truth. I didn’t tell her about Ashwin. I felt like a fool. I’d stood quietly by while Ashwin explained to Dr. and Mrs. Acharya that the house was in order, the backyard maintained, the mail stacked neatly in the den, the boat still covered in its tarp, per their instructions, unused. I watched Dr. Acharya hand him five crisp hundred-dollar bills. Then I watched him disappear into the kitchen. They didn’t ask me who I was. They didn’t say a word. Moments later, when Ashwin walked me to my car, he explained to me that Dr. Acharya was his cousin—he had sponsored his visa. They had asked Ashwin to housesit for them while they were away.

  I asked him who he really was and he shook his head.

  “No one you need to know.”

  I went into my bedroom and threw my bag on the floor, realizing that I was alone. I stared at my bed, where, not long before, Ashwin had ripped off my clothes. Just then there was a knock at the door. I turned around. It was Stephanie. She was holding a bowl of popcorn in her hands.

  “Where’s my cookbook?” she said.

  I couldn’t control it; I started to cry. I was only relieved that it hadn’t happened sooner, that it hadn’t happened in front of Dr. Acharya or his wife, that I hadn’t made a scene, pulling at Ashwin’s clothes, leaving them to wonder what was wrong. ◆

  if you see me, don’t say hi

  Deepak was my older brother, six years to be exact, which made him sixteen when I was ten. He was dark, the color of the walnut furniture in my parents’ bedroom. I was fair. And it was often a joke among our family and friends: how different we were. Like shadow and light, they said. Like milk and coal.

  Though I was small for my age, Deepak was very tall, with strong muscles in his shoulders and arms. His armpits smelled sweaty, like the raw onions my mother piled on top of our potato shaak. He would pick me up from school in my father’s Toyota, blasting rap music from the speakers: Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. It was 1994, and he wore oversized T-shirts above his baggy jeans. His thick wavy hair was always tucked under a cap. He wore a twenty-two-karat gold chain around his neck. We would ride around the neighborhood for a while, Deepak reciting every lyric to the song “Juicy.” “It was all a dream!” he would say, as trees flickered by.

  He was my guard. If a child my age happened to be harassing me at school, Deepak would wait for him on the playground.

  “You want me to kick your ass?” he would say, getting right up into the kid’s face. “You want me to kick your fucking ass?”

  The harassment would stop there, but only for a short while; after all, I was an easy target. At school they called me all sorts of names: Ali Baba, Aladdin, Apu. They asked me about my father’s 7-Eleven.

  “We don’t own a 7-Eleven,” I would tell them. “We own a motel.”

  My teachers were oblivious. Once, after an exam, my fifth-grade teacher asked me to say something to him in Farsi.

  “I don’t speak Farsi,” I said. “I speak Gujarati.”

  He stared at me blankly. “But you’re Persian.”

  “I’m Indian,” I said.

  “Like a tomahawk?” said Ryan Gillespie, a red-haired boy who’d once pulled my pants down in front of the entire class. “My dad says all Indians are lazy boozers.”

  Everyone laughed.

  I was frightened each morning on my way to school. During the Pledge of Allegiance, I held my breath like I did when we drove by a cemetery, wary of the vague expressions on my classmates’ faces. My teachers made us watch movies on slavery and segregation and then told us we were lucky to be living in the greatest nation in the world. It seemed implausible even then.

  In school, I learned very quickly what it meant to be brown: it meant that white kids only talked to you if they needed something, black kids only talked to you if no other black kids were around, and the rest of us wouldn’t talk at all. Not that it mattered. There were only three of us, anyway: a Persian named Farzad, a Mexican named Flora, and me.

  Every now and then, a classmate would tap me on my shoulder and ask me to say something to them in “Indian.” I was tempted to say “ben-chod,” which, when translated, means “sister-fucker.” I taught them “namaste” instead.

  “Namaste,” they would say, folding their hands in prayer.

  I never said it back.

  I was too busy trying to shrink myself. My parents would blast holy bhajans from our back porch on Sundays and I would crawl into my bedroom and shove a pillow over my head. According to my father, Indian people were the source of everything: music, mathematics, and dance. I remember watching TV with my parents once when a Britney Spears video came on. I was embarrassed to be in their presence, watching her swing her hips around, but my father was enthralled.

  “Look at this,” he said. “Indians dance with their hips and now even the whites are dancing with hips.”

  “The whites don’t have hips,” my mother said, laughing.

  And I, remembering to record the video so that I could masturbate to it in my room, said nothing at all.

  I wasn’t like Deepak. He had a way with girls—of looking at them, talking to them—that I never possessed. During the holiday of Navratri, my family would join other families at a rec center or a high school gym, where we danced around in a circle, wearing bright-colored clothes, and offered prayers to the goddess Durga. Invariably the children got away, to play basketball on the courts outside, or listen to music in their parents’ cars, or drink beer purchased by some older cousin or friend. Deepak would disappear, returning later with a lazy smile on his face, his shirt unbuttoned, his hair tousled or flat. Once, he waved his finger in the air.

  “Smell this,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Just do it.”

  Afraid that it was a prank, that he had stuck his finger in dog shit or his own ass, I ran away. But later, when he explained to me what he had done, that he had fingered a girl named Deepika behind a Dumpster, and that she had moaned and writhed on his hand, I wished I hadn’t.

  By the time he was a junior in college, Deepak had screwed half the Indian girls in our town—we lived in Bloomington, Illinois, in a small community surrounded by cornfields and a mall. Meanwhile, I harbored unrequited crushes on white girls. Girls with light brown hair, sparkling blue eyes, and long tanned legs in the summertime, who played tennis and swam laps at the country club and, unlike my cousin Monali, didn’t have to bleach their arm hair or wax their upper lips. They were girls who seemed to know their place in the world without ever questioning it, who tromped down the hallways with swinging ponytails and fragrant perfumes, and who teased the athletes with a flick of their smile. They were the kind of girls who would never look at me, not even once, not then at least. Not yet.

  * * *

  There was one other way in which Deepak and I were different: it was that he, unlike me, was an idiot. Halfway into his junior year at a marginally ranked college, Deepak flunked out. My parents were aghast. They treated it like a death in the family, which it was, in many ways: the death of a future, the death of an education, the death of their dreams of raising a doctor. I remember the gloomy day when Deepak returned to us with his suitcases full of unused textbooks and clothes, piling them into his room, locking his bedroom door. He remained there all night, and didn’t come out until late the next evening, pulling up a seat at the
table and refusing the daar, baath, rotli, and shaak my mother was offering, pouring a bowl of cereal instead. Over the next few days, he sat around the house watching music videos on MTV, staring into his computer screen, flipping through magazines. He started eating voraciously: whole packages of doughnuts and the chocolates my parents had brought back from a trip to London, fried chicken from KFC. He wore sweatpants and collegiate T-shirts he’d purchased from the campus bookstore during his first week at school. In the afternoons, I would come home from school and find him in the same position I’d seen him in when I left, which was with his legs splayed over the couch, his hands in his pants. He got fat—very fat. So fat I wondered how he even bathed. He started to smell like the homeless people who lingered outside our parents’ Best Western motel, drinking dark liquor or Colt 45. Sometimes he and my father would get into screaming matches, and my mother and I would exchange nervous glances in front of the TV. Once, Deepak didn’t come out of his room for three whole days. When he finally did, he was wearing a rumpled white dress shirt over a pair of faded black slacks.

  “I’m going to get a job,” he said, triumphantly.

  “Where?” my father asked.

  “At a car dealership. They’re hiring over at Ford.”

  My father snorted. “What car dealership? What nonsense.” He was eating fried puris and dipping them in yogurt. A piece of puri hung from his chin. “Car dealership,” he said, shaking his head. “I am buying cars and you are selling them.”

  But he never sold a single car, because he didn’t get the job, and after three weeks of frustration, after arguing late into the night, my parents came to a decision: Deepak would join them in the family business. It was up to me now, their one and only hope, to realize their dreams.

  * * *

  As it turned out, I was well on my way. By then I was a sophomore in high school, an honor student, and a member of the chess club. I had a photographic memory, which meant that I spent the vast majority of my time listening to Warren G albums instead of studying for exams. I still managed to pull straight As. While Deepak went to the motel each morning, to learn about franchising and how to hide small portions of money from the IRS, I went to school, buoyed by the prospect of talking to a girl. And there were many: Cindy and Lisa, Rebecca and Kate. But all of them paled in comparison to Alicia, with her tanned legs, her pendulous breasts. She wore tight shorts and denim tops that practically burst at the seams. She had bright yellow hair that she groomed with a comb. Sometimes I would count the shades of gold in her hair. Once, she caught me staring at her when she turned around to pass back an exam.